Thursday, January 19, 2012

Soldiers and Tears

This was written in response the "An Opportunity For Readers" challenge, in response to AJ's prompt: "He sat on her tombstone and laughed 'til he cried." It's (predictably) dark, but I like it. It's also longer than I expected it to be.

Soldiers and Tears

“Rhys
died a war hero. She'll be honored with the best funeral
accommodations the government has to offer. Anyone with the courage
and integrity to sacrifice his or her life for the greater good
deserves at least that.”

Jonathan
stares up at the soldier telling him this and wonders how she can
manage to seem so... cold—so distant—at a time like this.“Calm”
is too warm a word to describe the look on the fighter's face.

He
clenches his fists. Rhys deserves better
than this, he thinks. She
would have wanted something more. Joy, celebration, something.
She—

He cuts himself off in the middle of his thought, because he simply
doesn't know if all that's true anymore. When Rhys decided to leave
the village to go off and fight, she had seemed like a different
person than before. There was no complete personality reversal,
nothing like that, just a... shift in her thinking, that was all. The
old Rhys would never have joined the military to fight the monsters,
she would have fought them by herself. And, knowing Rhys, she
probably would have won, too.

The old Rhys still might have died, but it would have been on her own
terms, not the military's.

And
suddenly Jonathan wants to scream at this unfeeling soldier, to
scream at the army, at the government or, better yet, at the monsters
plaguing this country because the old Rhys—his
Rhys—should never have had to die or even change for them!

Instead, he barely manages to choke out a sentence. “Did you know
her?”

The soldier bites her lip. It's the first sign of emotion he's seen
from her all day. She can only be about eighteen, maybe nineteen. A
little younger than Rhys. “No,” she finally says. “We were
stationed in different parts of the country. I only heard of her when
she...”

“Then why are you here?”

“I...”
She swallows and glances around to make sure no one else is within
earshot. “It's what I'm supposed to do. I go to all the military
funerals and tell everybody what the government wants them to hear,
that this war is a good war and those who fight it are the best of
people. And then I just... don't... cry...
and they don't cry either, because they believe what I tell them.”

Jonathan leans forward. “So you're not a soldier.”

“I am,” she says. “Internal matters only, though.
Peace-keeping. The government doesn't want—” She cuts herself
off, knowing that there are some things she's just not allowed to say
and that this is getting dangerously close to them.

There is a pause. Gray clouds loom over the burial ground, promising
rain but never actually giving it.

Jonathan grabs the girl's hand. “Come to the gravestone with me. We
can laugh instead of cry. Rhys would have liked that.”

She smiles a little but shakes her head and walks away, back to the
post where the rest of her squad is waiting.

Jonathan goes to the grave alone. As the rain begins to fall, he
laughs until he cries. This is his own little secret, something he
can share with Rhys and Rhys alone. Whether or not she had changed,
it was the kind of thing her very spirit, the very essence of her
person, would have appreciated. She had always relished the
unexpected.